Brilliant light blazed, outlining the door at the top of the stairs. I looked away fast. Someone screamed-they hadn't, not in time.
A heat equal to that of the sun was consuming-had consumed-the centre of Manchester. The CIS tower, the Arndale Centre, the Lowry Hotel-all gone.
And Anya. Among all the rest, Anya too.
Then there was a distant rumbling. The sound was coming. The sound and the blast.
"Hands over your ears! Mouths open! Shut your eyes!"
And then, as I followed my own advice, the blast wave struck the school.
I've almost forgotten I'm in a tunnel. It's like watching a visual effect, a bit like one of those fractals you get on a computer, or the light effects a computer screen can create if you play a CD on it.
Got on a computer. The light effects a screen created. If you played a CD. It's all past tense now. I have to get used to the idea. All past tense.
Someone once asked Einstein, what would be the weapons of the Third World War? He said he didn't know. But that the weapons of the Fourth World War would be stones and clubs.
If anyone's left in a hundred years, and they read this-will they even understand what I'm talking about? So many reference points I took for granted, and they'll mean nothing to whoever-whatever?-survives, landmarks and signposts of a world long gone.
Christ, in a hundred years, will they still even read?
We used to bandy that one round the staff room, but then we were worried about literacy declining because the kids'd rather play on their Playstations and cruise porn sites on the internet. Reading? Who needs it if you can get rich and famous making a dick of yourself on a reality TV show?
Old Byerscough, the History master-he said it was capitalism's final and cleverest game to keep the working class in its place. Time was, you couldn't get an education if you were poor. Now? Now, they convince you education's for nancy-boys. Books? Being clever? Bollocks to that. Just get pissed or E'd up and have fun. And you think that's the best way, when you're just being kept happy and docile and stupid.
Past tense again. Byerscough too. He was close to retirement as well, and lived nearby, just like Makin, but he never thought about leaving. His wife had died a few years before. He died at the school. Not in the blast, but after when-
"Paul! Paul, wake up!"
Anya was shaking me. I must've slept through the alarm. But she'd be the one running late, wouldn't she? She had to get up before me. Neither of us could afford a place in the village where the school was, but I lived closer to it than to the city.
"Paul!" Desperation, terror. I smelt smoke. Not the alarm. A fire. The house was burning.
"Paul!" Not Anya's voice. Who was she? The bomb'd set the house on fire.
The Bomb. And I remembered where I was, and Anya-
"Paul!"
"Alright!" I sat up. My brain seemed to slosh around in my skull, water in a bowl. Fingers gripped my shoulders. Jean.
I could see light through the ceiling. The sky glowed. Sunset already? No, a fire.
Fire.
The school was gone. And the ceiling with it. Well, mostly. Some had blown away. The rest had fallen into the basement. And was burning. I was lucky; I'd been under the bit that'd blown away.
The air was full of screams. Kids and staff, trapped and burning.
And the sky-
I knew if I looked, I'd see the mushroom cloud, over the city, full of ashes and dust. Some of those ashes would be Anya's. And in a few minutes, she'd rain down on me.
And she'd be bringing the bomb with her.
"Everybody out!" I shouted. Things cracked and crackled all around me. And screamed.
We got up the stairs. Byerscough stopped at the top, then turned back, starting back down.
"Alf!" I shouted. "What're you-"
He turned wild eyes on me. "There's kids still down there, man!"
And he ran back down, even though the smoke was billowing and choking.
He stumbled back up, a few seconds later, smoke-grimed, red-eyed, coughing and choking, one of the girls in his arms. He set her down, ran back into the smoke. He never came back out.
Jean knelt by the little girl. When she looked up, she was crying. She shook her head.
"What do we do?" she said. "Oh God, what do we do now?"
Three of the staff were still alive: me, Jean and Frank Emerson, the Physics teacher. About a dozen kids. They were all looking at me.
"I've got an idea," I said.
The tunnel changes at last. A fork. The water laps around a big central column. The canal, going off in two directions. "Which way now?" Jean whispers.
Have to choose. Which way now? Have to pick. But what leads where? Where does each go? Which is better? Safer? Is there meaning to either word now?
"That way," I say, pointing right.
So we veer to the right. It only occurs to me later that veering to the right was what got us into this mess in the first place.
Minutes pass. I haven't looked at my watch in-not since before the bomb fell. Does it have any meaning anymore, anyway?
Then one of the kids screams.
"What is it?" I shout, trying to keep panic out of my own voice.
It's one of the boys, one of the younger ones. "A man," he shouts. "A man in the water."
I flick the torch-beam over the black surface. "There's no one there."
"He was there, Mr Forrester, sir. He was."
"What'd he look like?" A drowned miner? But no one's been down here in years. There'd only be bones by now.
"White," the boy sobs. "White."
A chill up my back, and it's not just being down here. The boy's hallucinating. Who can blame him? I'm surprised I'm not. Will I sleep later? And will I dream? God, please not.
"Let's keep going," I say.
We stumbled through the remains of the school. Passed what was left of Mr Rutter on the way. "Don't look," I told the kids. Bile crept into my throat. The smell of roast, charred pork.
To get where we were going, we had to pass the Physics lab. It was, for God knows what reason, the only part of the building left more or less intact. Frank Emerson let out a shout. "Wait up!" he yelled, and dashed into the lab.
"Frank!" I yelled. "We haven't time-"
"Trust me." He forced the store room door open and came out again seconds later, clutching what looked like a metal box with a microphone attached.
"What-"
He clicked the "microphone" on and there was a soft crackling, ticking sound. "Geiger counter," he said.
I was about to ask where that'd come from-not exactly standard-issue in schools these days-but it didn't matter. Never look a gift horse in the mouth and so on. "You're a genius," I said. "Come on."
Worsley village-now it's a posh, desirable residence sort of place (was, then; past tense once more, Mr Forrester) but in the Industrial Revolution it'd've been anything but. The Bridgewater and Liverpool/Manchester canals all met here, and the whole area was a big coalfield, bringing up about 10,000 tons of coal a day.
Why do I mention this?
Because of the Delph, where we were heading.
There was next to nothing left above ground. The houses were gone, and where most of them had been there was only fire. There was nowhere to hide from the dust that would soon be falling.
It might already be too late, of course. I'd been to the Imperial War Museum up at the Quays the year before; one of the exhibits had been an atom bomb. Deactivated, I presumed. Beside it had been a diagram, a sequence of concentric circles marking out distances from the blast, and a table showing what would happen within them.
Nothing would be left for a mile or so around the blast site. Anya was dust, again. But where Worsley was: